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The High Price Of Career Lies

Scott Thompson resigned as CEO of Yahoo after a discrepancy on his résumé came to light.

Why did Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson fudge his résumé? That’s the question that lingers in the wake of his resignation yesterday just four months after taking the helm. Ever since the news broke two weeks ago that Thompson claimed to have a degree in computer science when he didn’t, colleagues, pundits and many of the rest of us have been debating whether he was fit to run the company.

The padded résumé came to light in the course of a proxy war, as FORBES senior editor Susan Adams explains here. Daniel Loeb, head of hedge fund Third Point, who owns 5.8% of Yahoo and has a net worth of $1.2 billion according to the latest FORBES estimates, wanted control of the board and Thompson stood in his way. So he apparently went looking for dirt and easily turned up the discrepancy with a Google search. In business and in politics that’s not an unusual scenario.

Yahoo’s first reaction was to call Thompson’s résumé entry an “inadvertent error,” but it turns out this version of the résumé had been kicking around for more than a decade. Thompson blamed a search firm, which pointed the finger right back at him.

Ironically, Thompson probably didn’t need that degree to become Yahoo’s top dog. His prior job experience–he previously headed eBay’s PayPal unit–plus his degree in accounting from Stonehill College, were almost certainly enough. Still, like so many people, he seems to have yearned for a status symbol he would have liked to have had.

It’s the same feeling that causes workers to embellish their job descriptions, fudge their class ranks and suggest they graduated from college when they never did. Especially in a tough job market, graduates inflate their class standing for fear they’ll otherwise lose out to people who were just better test-takers.

Behind each deception there’s usually a rationalization – like, “Everybody does it.” “Who will ever know?” or “I deserve it.” As The New York Times noted here, other CEOs have lied about their credentials and not lost their posts. They include Ronald Zarrella, who as CEO of Bausch & Lomb, admitted in 2002 that while he attended New York University’s Stern School of Business at night, he did not graduate. He retained his perch until he retired six years later.

David Edmondson the former CEO of RadioShack, who also padded his résumé, didn’t fare as well, The Times notes. His claim: that he graduated from Pacific Coast Baptist College with bachelor’s degrees in theology and psychology. He resigned from the company in 2006 after admitting he didn’t have either.

History is full of fakers, and some almost get away with it. One of my favorite examples involves Lieut. Cmdr. Richard E Byrd, who won a medal in 1926 for being the first person to fly over the North Pole. Seventy years later, a Baltimore historian who studied his diary said that the Navy pilot had a leaky fuel tank and never reached the pole. I’ll bet Byrd, who died in 1957, always worried that his secret would get out.

Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda had a more tragic demise after wearing Vietnam War combat medals that he hadn’t earned. He committed suicide in 1996 when he heard Newsweek magazine was about to run a story questioning whether he was entitled to don the medals.

Sadly, there are some notorious examples in journalism too. Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her Washington Post story about an eight-year-old heroin addict, lost the prize two days later when judges found she made up the tale. More recently, in 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign after the paper discovered plagiarism and fabrication in his stories.

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He didn’t get in trouble for lying – he got in trouble because he was working for a company that cannot get it right, and they needed someone to blame. I highly doubt that we would even know about this if Yahoo was tripling it’s value. Who cares if he lied, or what his qualifications are – what matters is can he (or anyone) do the job.

And it doesn’t just make him look bad – it makes the entire Yahoo administration look stupid. With their deep pockets and resources, they couldn’t find this out before they hired him? No wonder they just can’t make it.

Some 30+ years a wise old mentor of mine gave me this advice—”Never Trade a Career for a Moment.” Write it down and live it.

Sadly, I know a company (can’t say the name for fear of retribution) that let such arrogant actions and activities go unscathed –if you were an executive. What CEO could pull off being intoxicated and having a “who’s got the best ass” contest among other inappropriate behaviors, at a sales conference, and get away with it solely because the executive team didn’t have the cajones to take appropriate action. SAD–VERY SAD! And such people want our respect? Clearly, some companies have a higher value system. Sure wish Moses wouldn’t have dropped that tablet about fair play and equity.

Legally, at least, nothing really unless it maybe has to do with embellishing things to get a high security position. If someone makes lots of money and dupes investors, then there might also be something that could be done (unjust enrichment and/or investment fraud), but if it’s just considered engaging in permissible hyperbole, or “embellishment” of one’s accomplishments, then there is nothing in the law that prevents this. In England (and Europe?) I believe they do have some more extensive morality/ethics laws, but these don’t exist in the U.S. You cannot sue someone in the U.S. for just being ethically challenged (or even completely unethical) – they have to have broken an actual U.S. law. Fortunately, or unfortunately we don’t have ethics laws here.